York Guides

Midway along the range a small building is attached to the outside of its west wall opposite the twelfth and thirteenth bays. It is approached from the north by a passage with a recess for a cupboard on its west side. The room itself is complete and unaltered, with its three windows, its hooded fireplace, and an irregular ribbed vault designed to allow the lay-brothers' day-stairs to pass over it. This was the cellarer's office, ideally placed for checking the stores as they were brought into the cellarium, and it is the only example that has survived intact from so early a date.

A pentise ran north from this office outside the west wall of the range, and was returned along the side of the church for a short way, where it covered a doorway into the south aisle of the nave. This was the way by which the lay-brothers went under cover from their day-stairs to the church, and the doorway was blocked later in the Middle Ages when they no longer used the nave.

Two yards enclosed by high walls lay outside the west wall of the range north of the cellarer's office. The dividing wall between the yards was opposite the fifth bay of the range, but nothing remains of them now. They served to isolate transport unloading before the cellarium doors from the rest of the traffic in the great court.